CPAs, spouses cope with crushing workload

Business Lives

While William Regen, a certified public accountant, stays late at his Manhattan office churning out clients' tax returns, his wife, Lillian, blows her Weight Watchers diet on pizza or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. A chocolate bar serves as her usual nightcap.

Dealing with three months of mate-free time is an annual ritual for spouses of CPAs. Each year, as the more than 11,000 CPAs in the city confront the profession's most compressed and crushing deadlines—March 15 for corporate returns and April 15 for personal income tax, partnership and trust returns—their other halves brace themselves for single life. Clients' late returns and year-end planning only add to their solo woes, as does the current economic crisis, which has not only curtailed their extracurricular spending but also muzzled their griping.

Glad to be working

“People don't understand how crazy the hours are, but I don't want to complain. In this recession, I'm very grateful that we're both working,” says Ms. Regen, whose husband is a partner in Regen Benz & Mackenzie in Manhattan.

Still, for spouses caring for children, daily parenting can turn into solitary drudgery.

“It's especially tough on the kids,” says Linda Aponte, a CPA turned stay-at-home mom with three kids, ages 4, 3 and 5 months. Her husband, Stephen, is a senior tax manager at Holtz Rubenstein Reminick & Co. “Sometimes they don't see my husband for four to five nights,” she says.

Not every tax widow or widower complains about loneliness. For empty-nesters and families with older kids at home, spouse-free time can be downright liberating, with fewer meals to prepare and more nights to meet with friends. They also relish more hours to curl up with a book without distractions.

Naomi Horowitz—mother of a son, 15, and daughter, 12, and director of alumni affairs at a private school in Queens—appreciates having the time to “take yoga classes, watch TV without "Who's taking over the remote,' and make phone calls to catch up with old friends.”

Yet even Ms. Horowitz experiences doleful moments during her husband's busiest season. “What you miss is the family unit, and that's what hurts,” she says. “We chill out and wait for tax season to end.”

Despite their misery, CPA spouses don't love company when it makes them feel like a third wheel. Without her husband at her side, fitness instructor and Citibank Project Manager Gina Torres declined invitations this tax season to join friends for an overnight in the Poconos with her daughter, Angelica, 6.

“I can't stay in touch with the children's education,” says Irwin Horowitz, Naomi's husband, a CPA with ERE in Manhattan. “By the time I get home, it's too late to catch up on what happened during the day, and I'm too exhausted,”

Erica Rubin, a senior manager at Marks Paneth & Shron in Manhattan, still remembers her emotional response to the day trip her husband and daughter took to the circus two years ago while she slaved over clients' tax returns. “I wanted them to have a good time, but I felt bad that I could not be with them,” she says.

Few indulgences

This tax season, the teetering economy has put a crimp in many spouses' tax-time entertainment. Their family finances are still intact, with partner salaries averaging from $200,000 to more than $1 million. But typical indulgences, such as taking mother-and-daughter bonding trips, have fallen by the wayside as rich and poor cut back.

Robin Gorman Newman, who is married to a CPA and works from her Great Neck, L.I., home on her Web site, Motherhoodlater.com, has refrained from exercising at the gym in the evenings this year. She can't justify paying a babysitter $30 to watch her 6-year-old son—on top of keeping her $500 monthly gym membership, which includes sessions with a personal trainer.

On the positive side, the economy has to some extent suppressed spouses' griping.

Ms. Rubin was already a CPA when she and Abe Steinmetz walked down the aisle 23 years ago. Their union produced four children, ages 9 to 20, and turned Mr. Steinmetz, a real estate broker in Brooklyn's Coney Island, into the kids' primary caregiver during his wife's busy season. Though he still helps their youngest child with homework after getting dinner on the table five nights a week, he says he isn't complaining. “Nowadays, I'm happy that she brings in money.”

But here's the dirty little secret: After tax season, a CPA's intense workload only temporarily subsides. Late returns are due on Sept. 15 and Oct. 15—which leaves many spouses home alone, again. “There's really only three months of a quiet period,” says Ms. Rubin.

WHAT THEY MAKE

CPAs average annual salary

PARTNER IN A SMALL FIRM $200K+

PARTNER IN A MIDSIZE FIRM $400K+

PARTNER IN A NATIONAL FIRM $1M+

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MANAGEABLE STRAIN

LATE NIGHTS AT THE OFFICE and minimal conversation may sound like an itemized guide for divorce. But the seasonal habits of CPAs won't doom a marriage, says Mel Schwartz, a Manhattan psychotherapist and author of The Art of Intimacy, the Pleasure of Passion.

CPAs' unavailability during tax season will tax an unhealthy marriage, but their limited availability has no effect on a healthy marriage, he says.

Even so, after 12 weeks of limited contact, couples say they need to ease back into their pre-tax season lives. After working on adrenalin, it takes a few days or weeks to get back into the groove with the home life and the family, says Erica Rubin, a CPA and a senior manager at Marks Paneth & Shron.

And while CPAs need time to unwindI just want to stay home, says Marc Newman, a partner at accounting firm Buchbinder Tunick & Co.their other halves are ready to socialize. His wife, Robin Gorman Newman, can't wait to bust loose, she says. I feel entitled.

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